But that's just it - the silent re-ranking of stories, algorithmic or editorial, can also flip elections. Not just elections, it can entirely change the direction a culture is headed.
And it causes no backlash - you wouldn't even know it was happening, unless you laboriously compared statistics with how much exposure stories (not just news stories, films and books shape our perception of the world just as much) get, for the few sufficiently objective categories where a meaningful comparison can be made.
Don’t take it that I don’t agree, just that it doesn’t need to be subtle. We already had the FBI and bureaucracy cover up a scandal because they were invested in someone else winning the presidential election.
Let’s worry about the thing that already happened instead of the hypothetical.
And it causes no backlash - you wouldn't even know it was happening, unless you laboriously compared statistics with how much exposure stories (not just news stories, films and books shape our perception of the world just as much) get, for the few sufficiently objective categories where a meaningful comparison can be made.